Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) (5 page)

Hip-hop is folk music. Melodies, motifs, stories, cadences, slang and pulses are all handed down among generations and micro-generations, evolving so rapidly that it’s easy to lose track of exactly where anything actually began. Check the technique and see if you can follow it:

• In 1986 in New York, Kool Moe Dee told careless Casanovas to “Go See the Doctor.”

• In 1989, Dr. Dre manipulated Moe Dee’s record, giving his self-assured baritone a case of the hiccups, making him stutter out “the-the-Doc, the-the-the-Doc” on “Mind Blowin’,” a single by Dre’s protégée The D.O.C.

• In 1993, to show respect to his West Coast paterfamilias, Snoop Dogg vocally emulated the Dre-tweaked stutter on his debut single, “Who Am I (What’s My Name),” rapping he’s “funky as the-the-the Doc.” As the centerpiece of a multiplatinum album, Snoop’s version of the line ended up being the most popular one of all.

• Snoop was surely the influence when the line went back to New York in 1999, when Jay-Z started “Jigga My
N----” with a salute to his Roc-A-Fella record label: “Jay-Z, motherfucker, from the-the-the Roc.”

• Influenced by Jay-Z’s unknockable hustle, Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy flipped Jigga’s rock-hard version in 2005 on “Bottom of the Map” with “I do it for the trappers with the-the-the rocks.”

It’s similar to the way folk musicians update the storyline of a popular murder ballad or put their unique pluck on a familiar set of chords. Sampling, however is a uniquely post-modern twist, turning folk heritage into a living being, something that transfers more than just DNA. Through sampling, hip-hop producers can literally borrow the song that influenced them, replay it, reuse it, rethink it, repeat it, recontextualize it. Some samples leave all the emotional weight and cultural signifiers of an existing piece of music intact — a colloidal particle that floats inside a piece of music yet maintains its inherent properties. All the associations that a listener may have with an existing piece of music are handed down to the new creation — whether it’s as complicated as a nostalgic memory over a beloved hook or as elemental as a head-nod to a funky groove you don’t specifically recognize.

Take the piano riff in Joe Cocker’s 1973 hit “Woman to Woman,” used in 2Pac and Dr. Dre’s 1995 smash “California Love.” Upon hearing “California Love,” an older listener might associate the riff with how much they did or didn’t enjoy the Joe Cocker original.
A younger listener might think of it as a hip-hop hand-me-down, associating it with the Ultramagnetic MCs or EPMD songs that sampled the riff in the late ’80s. An even younger listener might not recognize it at all but simply understand that, since it clashes against a high-polished Dr. Dre production, it’s something “old” or “borrowed” or “funky,” imbued with an odor that’s mysterious but still evocative.

Nation of Millions
is congested with 100 of these samples — maybe more — ranging from the familiar to the obscure to the completely unrecognizable. A guitar lick from British rock band Sweet adds to the delirious feel of “Cold Lampin with Flavor.” Is it enough to say that the track “Funk It Up” is a great circa-1976 groove chugger on par with Thin Lizzy’s “Johnny the Fox”? Or is it worth noting that, just like Public Enemy in 1987, Sweet in 1976 were trying to reposition their band as a heavier, meaner, steely-eyed alternative to their past work? Is it a coincidence that
Nation of Millions
, an album focused on liberation, samples Isaac Hayes’ legendary move away from record company dictates, itself a singular success that followed a retail flop? Are the JB’s and Funkadelic and Temptations records that Public Enemy use permeated with special triumph and tumult since they originally appeared shortly after lineup changes?

“We use samples like an artist would use paint,”
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Hank Shocklee once said. Their style was not the surrealist clouds of the Beastie Boys or the De La
Soul sample collisions that would follow in
Nation of Millions
’ wake. The Bomb Squad style of painting was a violent pointillism, taking a single guitar stab or drum kick and dotting the landscape until a song emerged. The Bomb Squad mistreated their samples — when one sounded too “clean,” Hank would throw the record to the floor, stomp on it and try again. They would occasionally break the (still standing) unspoken producer’s rule of “always sample the original recording” and sample a sample, just for an extra bit of chaos.

Their techniques were unlike anything of the era. And thanks to the diligent work of copyright attorneys, their cavalier, frontiersman attitude toward samples will never be repeated — at least not with the support and budget of a record label. They sampled dozens of records because there was never anyone saying they couldn’t. When Chuck envisioned the courtroom drama in “Caught, Can I Get a Witness,” a track in which he’s called in front of a judge because he “stole a beat,” it was a dystopic fantasy, a piece of fiction. Within a year, his story became reality. Once hip-hop started reaching critical mass in the late ’80s, many white rock artists were coming out saying they were simply livid over the fact that their music was being used in rap. Lawsuits started popping up everywhere, as old-guard musicians demanded to be paid. The Turtles spoke up first when their woozy 1969 hit “You Showed Me” (a song they didn’t even write themselves) was used in a skit by the equally tripped-out De La Soul.
The rappers, admitting no guilt, were taken for an out-of-court settlement. In a landmark 1991 case, Biz Markie was sued by bushy-haired ’70s soft-rock balladeer Gilbert O’Sullivan for using parts of O’Sullivan’s No. 1 single “Alone Again (Naturally).” The court equated sampling with theft, citing precedent in the Bible’s(!) ruling of “Thou shalt not steal.” It ruled that Biz’s label, Warner Bros., had a “callous disregard for the law and for the rights of others.”
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Since this case, record labels have been legally bound to pay for every sample on a record, making sample-heavy records like
Nation of Millions
a cost-prohibitive exercise. As record labels became savvier in regard to the lucrative world of sample clearance, even borrowing the simplest snare crack became an impossible hurdle. As Hank told
Stay Free
magazine:

By 1991, Public Enemy had to move from the sample-splatter of
Nation of Millions
to the more skeletal, studio-styled headbang of
Apocalypse ’91
. By the time they did the
He Got Game
soundtrack, in 1998, Hank said Def Jam had hired someone to be in the studio with them, looking over their shoulders in case they reached for a piece of unlicensed vinyl contraband. Today, the average price to sample a record is about $10,000 — meaning that making a masterwork like
Nation of Millions
would cost literally millions.

Chuck D was no young pup when
Nation of Millions
was released. He had long since graduated college, he had already held down jobs he hated and jobs he liked, he had already given up on his dreams of being a rapper (“I was already a certain age. I looked at being an entertainer as a step down”
³⁰
) and then rebuilt them from the ground up, and he had already released an album, all by the time he was 28. “Don’t print my age,” Chuck told
Spin
in 1988. “[I]n order to communicate with the youth, you have to be recognized as a peer. Something has to be there that they can say, ‘This is me.’”
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To put it in perspective, compare Chuck’s age to that of the other MCs who, at the dawn of 1988, were preparing to release their soon-to-be-classic second records. According to the admittedly sketchy
information floating around the Internet about rappers’ real ages: Rakim was around 20 for his second round; KRS-One, 23; Salt-N-Pepa were both 24; the set-to-blow Fresh Prince was 20; already-blown LL Cool J, also 20, was between his second and third records; Chuck’s idols Run-DMC, about to release their
fourth
album, were collectively around 24; Too $hort, already a legend at 22, was on his fifth. Not to mention all the new faces who would appear in the course of the year — Ice Cube and MC Ren, MC Lyte, King Tee, De La Soul, Super Lover Cee and Casanova Rud — all mostly still in their teens. In “Rebel without a Pause,” when Chuck says “Rough . . .’cause I’m a man,” it is no empty boast. “Old enough to raise ya, so this will faze ya.”

Chuck, Flav, Hank and Eric had a unique perspective not afforded to their contemporaries: vivid memories of the 1960s. “I can’t even relate to some of the subjects people are talking about today,” said Chuck in his bio, “because they are products of the ’70s and ’80s and were influenced by TV shows like
Good Times, The Jeffersons
and
Sanford and Son
. . . [In the 1970s] Vietnam was over. It was an era of cocaine, heroin, partying and having a good time.”
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The age difference meant Public Enemy witnessed the rise of Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad, the speeches of Malcolm X, the emergence of the Black Panther Party, the start of the Vietnam War and its protest movement, the assassinations of Malcolm and Robert Kennedy
and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the gunning down of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the Chicago Police. And even though he was about 3 years old at the time, Chuck remembers 1963; he remembers NAACP field secretary Medgar Evars being murdered by a white supremacist in front of his Mississippi home, he remembers the 250,000-plus-strong March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where MLK did some sampling of his own, invoking the “Free at Last” spiritual for the climax of his “I Have a Dream” speech. Chuck remembers JFK being assassinated five months after the president introduced his plan for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He remembers being in the third grade and seeing his activist mother go to work dressed in black. She told Chuck that her white co-workers were terrified that one man could move so many African-Americans.

The slow crescendo of the black radical movement in the 1960s was echoed by James Brown’s transformation from the ballad-belting Mr. Dynamite to a fiery voice of protest. In the early part of the decade, there was a balancing act between Martin Luther King’s message of integration and non-violence and Malcolm X’s message of racial separatism and “by any means necessary” actions. Funk anthologist Rickey Vincent notes, “Dr. King had a dream that blacks could work together, while Malcolm X was adamant that blacks take care of their own business. The two leaders balanced each other, fed off each other’s roles and
provided the strongest leadership core black Americans had enjoyed since the Harlem Renaissance.”
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But after Malcolm’s assassination in February 1965, non-violence slowly became an antiquated notion to some African-American youth — a frustration eventually played out in the charred buildings of the Watts rebellion and the embrace of the well-armed resistance of the Black Panthers. Angrier times called for harder music. The same month that Malcolm X was shot, James Brown recorded “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” the song that put the downbeat on the spine-cracking “one” instead of the two and four, the song that used violent horn explosions and guitar pinpricks as percussion instruments, the song that essentially invented funk as we know it. That track was slightly sped up in post-production to be extra frantic — a trick that Hank Shocklee would later use to help make
Nation of Millions
the most hectic hip-hop record ever.

Brown was still a few steps behind the counter-culture in 1966. While the Black Panthers were rejecting Martin Luther King’s integrationist stance, Brown’s single “Don’t Be a Dropout” was actually a proud mirror of King’s messages of unity, inclusion and using the system to your advantage. Brown was the living symbol of an African-American achieving enormous success in a white music industry, and he began to take his position as a role model seriously, visiting schools as part of an anti-dropout campaign, reporting to vice president Hubert Humphries on what was
happening in the places the government didn’t visit, buying radio stations to serve black communities, even offering to play for the troops in Vietnam. He became the symbolic voice of the civil rights movement. When King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Brown famously asked the mayor of Boston to televise his (almost canceled) concert the following evening, to give people something else to think about. While black nationalists like H. Rap Brown and Eldridge Cleaver spoke of government upheaval and violent revolution, Brown was still saying, “The real answer to race problems in this country is education. Be qualified. Own something. Be somebody. That’s Black Power.”
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The summer of 1968 saw the assassination of civil rights advocate Robert Kennedy and the FBI raid on the Black Panthers. Militants criticized Brown’s “America Is My Home” single and his stumping for Humphries. Syndicated news columnist Earl Wilson asked Brown, on the record, if he didn’t think that by dining with LBJ and going to Vietnam made him some kind of “Uncle Tom.” He even received death threats. Enough was enough. Brown had so much trouble on his mind. He fired off some socially conscious burners, writing and producing two songs for Hank Ballard: “Blackenized” (“You been leanin’ on others to be your keeper / That’s why they call you Negroes and colored people”) and “How You Gonna Get Respect (When You Haven’t Cut Your Process Yet),” a song about taking pride in natural, unrelaxed hair (Brown had, for
a while, symbolically ditched his iconic processed pompadour). But most important, Brown dropped “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).” “‘Say It Loud’ was a turning point in black music,” says Vincent. “Never before had black popular music explicitly reflected the bitterness of blacks towards the white man — and here it was done with ferocious funk.” In between takes, Brown said to everyone in the room, “About 50 million people waitin’ to hear this one.”
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